The Ticking Clock
an excerpt

Madeline awoke to the sound of beeping. A quiet, regular beep. Soothing, by the sound. It sounded somehow… familiar… in rhythm. Beep. Beep. Beep. It seemed to go with her breath, somehow. It seemed to go with… her heart. Her heart was making that noise.
“My heart has never made that noise before,” she said to herself, or tried to at any rate. Her mouth felt fuzzy, as if she’d been asleep a long long time. What time was it? That had been one crazy dream, with her, and Bernie, and the fight, and the strange, strange other world. She had never thought up anything that wild before. She wondered if she and Bernie were still fighting. She wondered what time it was. She wondered why her thoughts were coming out all fuzzy, as if she was thinking in sleepy slow circles.
She wondered why her heart was making that noise. She wondered why the walls looked so white in her bedroom. They’d never looked that white before. They’d been painted yellow, and they looked yellow normally, even in the brightest light. She wished her heart would beat a little less fast, because the beeping was too frequent, and she was finding it irritating.
Madeline wondered what time it was. She wondered why things were wild. She wondered what had happened to Rupert during the fire. “Who’s Rupert?” she found herself asking aloud, even though this time she hadn’t mean to. Her father had died in a fire, and she had been sad about this a long time, even after her mother went back to work. She worked an awful lot, and drank an awful lot. That was how mothers were, though, Madeline supposed. She wondered why her mother hadn’t come in to wake her up yet this morning.
“It’s because I still saw sleep with my eyes,” she said, and wondered what she meant. She wondered that she had never thought of anything like that before. It was the circle thinking, she knew that. But at least her beeps had slowed back down.
“Beep. Beep. Beep.” She said aloud, and giggled. The dog. The dog had been named Rupert. He had eaten the cheese off of her pizza. In the white room? No, in the kitchen. It seemed to go with her breath.
“I wish I could think straight,” she said. But then there were always straight lines on the earth, but physics said even those curved at an alarming rate. Only geometry was pure. Only mothers drank so much.
She thought maybe she would write some poetry someday. She wondered why she would think such a thing. She wondered why her heart had waited sixteen years to start making that alarming noise. She wondered if it meant she was in love. She wondered with whom that could be.